Sounds of Surveillance: U.S. Spanish- Language Radio Patrols La Migra

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©2011 The American Studies Association

Sounds of Surveillance: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio Patrols La MigraDolores Inés Casillas

Señor, quiero darle las gracias por esa pregunta porque me da la oportunidad de decirle a los que nos escuchan la misma cosa que le voy a decir a usted. Si usted recibe algo de la inmigración y tiene un sello que fue enviado de la estación en Juárez, no necesita cruzar la frontera para completar el proceso.1

Sir, I’d like to thank you for asking that question, because this gives me the opportunity to tell fellow listeners out there the same advice that I’m about to share with you. If you receive anything in the mail from the INS postmarked from their Juárez [Mexico] station, you do not need to cross the border to complete the [legal documentation] process there.

—Guest attorney answering caller’s immigration question (2004)

¡La migra está aquí en el Eastern y Whittier Boulevard, no se acercan si no tienen papeles!

La migra is here at the corner of Eastern and Whittier Boulevard, stay away if you don’t have [legal] papers!

—Caller’s on-air warning (2005)

Utterances of immigration and the immigrant experience are repeat-edly heard on Spanish-language radio, often voiced live with a tenor of urgency and well outside the lyrical boundaries of song.2 With a

rich history of catering to immigrant-based listeners,3 Spanish-language radio has capitalized—quite lucratively—on the conversation around immigration. Both commercial and community-based radio stations routinely feature a live call-in segment with a guest expert, be it a doctor, social worker, nutritionist, or the occasional politician. Yet it is clearly the billing of a guest immigration attorney that consistently attracts a high volume of caller participation. As one radio host shared with me, “The lines light up like a Christmas tree well before we say ‘OK, we welcome your calls.’”4 Depending on the particulars of the radio show, listeners receive an hour or two of current and free legal updates as they sympathetically listen to the legal plights of others. Together, listeners make sense of revisions to already intricate legal forms, complain about periodic

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increases in filing fees, share their frustrations with long bureaucratic waits or, as with the caller above, ask with apparent worry whether to report to a Department of Homeland Security regional office on the U.S. or Mexico side of the border. Often, callers’ questions make public the labyrinth of variables they must navigate to petition for U.S. citizenship. Listeners learn quickly that their nationality, date of entry, mode of entry, marital status, legal status of family members, and date of initial application all play decisive roles in where their petitions land in the crowded legal pipeline.

While guest attorneys counsel listeners within a semistructured format, on-air “migra alerts” are spontaneous, fleeting warnings to listeners that Im-migration Customs Enforcement, referenced informally as la migra, has been sighted. The migra alerts function as a subversive “traffic report” for immigrants to avoid certain roads and highways in their commutes to work. In general, Q&A shows help callers maneuver through their delicate routes toward citi-zenship, as migra alerts caution the listening public against deportation. Such broadcasts in Spanish have responded to shifts in immigration policy, increased state surveillance, and revamped FM radio. These live and unstaged instances of radioing, where callers stammer through immigration questions or elicit warnings through strained voices, make clear that immigration is experienced through sound. Perhaps most significantly, both Q&A shows and on-air alerts underscore radio’s ability, in contrast to a medium like television, to operate transgressively in real time.

For U.S. Latinos, broadcasting in Spanish has become increasingly politi-cally significant in the context of contemporary debates over English-only state mandates and proposed anti-immigrant legislation.5 An “accent” or specific word use can index a speaker’s specific region or locale within Latin America, Central America, or Mexico. For those unfamiliar with Spanish, the language itself carries racialized and classed connotations linked to the mouths and bodies of Latinos, but specifically Mexicans.6 From birthright citizenship and access to health care, to extending immigration agent duties onto local enforcement, not only do campaigns around immigrant-based issues cast Latino immigrants as profoundly negative elements, but the stories soon go viral in the English-language news press before said issues are ever actually enacted into law. The ugly publicity itself tacitly constructs a racialized climate of suspicion that manifests in anti-immigrant legislation where, for instance, speaking Spanish is frowned on (antibilingual education initiatives); standing outside Home Depot stores is discouraged (local “loitering” ordinances); or one’s legal status is questioned based on phenotypic features (Arizona SB 1070). Legal efforts


have been made to transfer the state’s power of surveillance to citizens, bringing the language, mobility, and bodies of immigrants under refreshed scrutiny. The post-9/11 moment, in particular, has ushered in racial and linguistic profil-ing under the discursive guise of “patriotism” and “national security.”7 These legislative and public sanctioned “gazes” are heard and challenged through broadcast segments of Spanish-language radio.

True, the institutional growth alone of Spanish-language radio merits its own analysis, yet this essay focuses explicitly on how the political significance of Spanish-language radio has evolved in tandem with spells of troubling anti-immigrant public sentiment. Scholars of ethnic media tend to evoke theories of nostalgia to explain the attraction of non-English-language media outlets to immigrant communities.8 Radio studies, on the other hand, gripped by the 1920s to 1950s pre-television era, seldom define radio outside the parameters of the United States and English.9 And still others long for healthier representa-tions of immigrants and communities of color on television and film.10 I argue, as a counterpoint, that in actuality it is Spanish-language radio’s engagement with the political present that has lured Latinos to tune in to radio in record numbers. Specifically, it is the need to seek legal advice and documentation without being visually recognized that privileges the medium of sound. This is evidenced through three particular events from the last three decades: the 1980s and its historic passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, or amnesty; the 1990s with its series of legislative and physical border en-forcements, namely, California’s Proposition 187 and nationally, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act; and the post-9/11 moment when Orwellian strategies of surveillance became rationalized as a way to address the “war on terror.”11 To capture the aural zeitgeist of these three eras on Spanish-language radio, this article relies on recordings of Q&A radio shows between 2004 and 2006; ethnographic listening notes taken between 2003 and 2006; interviews with radio hosts conducted in 2004 and 2006; and newspaper coverage of events that took place within the last thirty years.

Both Q&A exchanges with immigration attorneys and la migra alerts from the listening public rely heavily on the participation of listeners themselves. The “experience of simultaneity” among a legion of listeners marks the pre-cise moment that sentiments of community are echoed and realized through sound.12 Apart from achieving a collective sense of understanding, such radio broadcasts serve as enfranchised spaces and opportunities for live engagement among Latino listeners, essential components of cultural citizenship.13 In truth, Spanish-language broadcasts along the West Coast have long provided (na-


tionalist) sustenance for a Mexican-dominant listenership displaced by politics and capitalism, those yearning for an audible, familiar semblance of “home.”14 Listening offers an opportunity to retreat or a sense of security unattainable through silence.15 Within these specific immigrant-directed broadcasts, the role of listening crafts a distinct aural public sphere where citizenship is not a (quiet) formality tied to paper-and-pen but a personal subject matter voiced publicly (callers) and experienced collectively (listeners). As an acoustic ally, Spanish-language broadcasts not only assume callers and listeners are undocu-mented persons, legal residents, or from mixed-status families, but popular radio hosts and radio programs openly rally in solidarity of their listeners’ civil rights, a provocative feat both given and because of the recurrent changes in immigration politics.16

Perhaps in light of recent and much pricier “I-technologies,” namely, the iPod, iPhone, iTouch, and their newest sibling, the iPad, the radio set has been largely ignored as a tool of globalization. Yet, just as the Internet is championed for collapsing public and private spheres by channeling “public” information into the “private” spheres of home, radio is uniquely and comparably produc-tive. Clearly, U.S. Spanish-language radio is an acoustic tool for listeners, specifically its most legally vulnerable immigrant listeners, to navigate the U.S. immigration system during moments of political discrimination and height-ened security. For immigrants, the safety of select public corners as well as the complexity of immigration law—all, arguably, “effects” of globalization—are magnified and experienced at home via radio.

Trade magazines credit the astounding growth of Spanish-language radio to the increase in the Latino population, a convenient “cause and effect” rationale.17 Radio industries routinely tout that Latino listeners (Spanish dominant or not) tune in to radio an average of three hours a week longer than the “average” U.S. radio listener;18 an impressive 13.5 percent of all U.S. radio broadcasts are in Spanish.19 (In fact, when given the option of eliminat-ing either the Internet or the radio, 67 percent of Latinos surveyed chose to keep radio and oust the Internet.)20 In 1980 the Federal Communications Commission found sixty-seven Spanish-oriented radio stations on the air. By the year 2000 the figure had increased dramatically to nearly six hundred, signifying a near 500 percent increase.21 The latest 2009 figures list over one thousand radio stations that broadcast exclusively in Spanish.22 Since the 1990s, Spanish-language radio stations have unseated their English-language counterparts from number-one standings in major radio markets: Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, and New York City.23 Even the airwaves of “non-traditional” Latino metropolises—such as Salt Lake City, Utah; Raleigh, North Carolina;


and Grand Island, Nebraska—have also witnessed this growth.24 The rise of Spanish-language radio has hardly been quiet. On the contrary,

with the influx of what Lisa Catazanarite refers to as “brown-collar” occupa-tions—where Latino immigrant men disproportionately account for 40 to 71 percent of construction workers, house painters, waiters’ assistants, and other temporary service-level positions25—the American public has become used to overhearing Spanish-language radio when passing construction sites or frequenting a restroom located at the back of a restaurant. Hearing Span-ish signals the audible, though not necessarily visible, presence of Latinos as laborers. Likewise, public transit stops and public transit itself, busses and light rail systems, have become key publicity sites for Spanish-language radio call letters. The stations, knowing full well their listening base, whose annual income bracket is reportedly an average of $29,000 or less,26 are most likely using a bus than the carpool lane to get to work. Still, demographics explain only part of the affinity Latino listeners share for Spanish-language radio.

The intimacy entailed in radio listening coupled with the inherent anonym-ity made possible through sound has proven to be an efficacious condition of radio for many Latino immigrant listeners. With one’s legal status increasingly consequential, sound offers an important site for the vulnerability of listen-ers. Over the air, radio hosts and listeners make themselves present through their voice and often by identifying themselves by a first name. Real identities are largely masked by telephone and stories quickly disappear over the ether, important facets given the racialized post-9/11 moment. As immigration law and anti-immigrant racism continue to work through visual vocabularies and tactics, Spanish-language radio has responded through novel uses of sound and speech.

Broadcasting Amnesty

The U.S. passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) on November 6, 1986, attempted to curb the influx of immigrants who had been steadily entering the country since the era of the Bracero Program (1942–64), which granted temporary work permits to Mexican nationals.27 Overall, IRCA granted amnesty to approximately 3 million undocumented immigrants working and residing in the United States; an overwhelming 2.3 million were Mexican nationals.28 IRCA’s details occupied Spanish-language radio shows for weeks. Not only did radio act as a tool to disseminate information on the particulars of IRCA, but its interactive call-in element allowed listeners to air their concerns and detailed questions.


Radio stations informed listeners that to qualify for IRCA, they had to prove that they had been residing in the United States since January 1, 1982, without criminal charges and with “some” knowledge of English and U.S. his-tory. But radio also unveiled a much more complicated discussion. Two major newspaper articles from the time elucidated the unique role of Spanish-language radio stations in providing on-air assistance to worried listeners. For instance, a Wall Street Journal front-page article from November 1, 1986, aptly titled “Alien Process,” called on the double meaning of the word “alien” to refer to both undocumented residents and the widespread confusion with the IRCA process. The article described a Friday night two-hour call-in show based in Houston, Texas, whose guest attorneys answered IRCA-related questions. Callers’ questions included the following:

What will happen, for example, to the Mexican man who is the radio show’s first caller? He has saved paycheck stubs dating from 1981, but the checks were issued to the fictitious name on his phony Social Security card.

The next caller is a Guatemalan woman who frets over the English language requirement. “Will I need to know Shakespeare?” she wants to know. Then there is a Salvadoran boy. He doesn’t qualify for amnesty, but his father does. Will he have to leave home? . . .

After two hours, the show ends with a particularly perplexing case—a Mexican man who doesn’t know whether a record of several traffic tickets will help him by establishing his presence in the U.S. or disqualify him by establishing him as a chronic abuser of the law.29

Because listeners posed questions that may have had negative ramifications for potential immigrants seeking amnesty, this particular radio program provided the much-needed anonymity allowed through sound. Questions unveiled a maze of complications and gave voice to anxieties tied to the amnesty process. Because living and working without a green card in the United States is literally “illegal,” immigrants used unlawful means to secure jobs in the United States (i.e., presenting fake Social Security cards), concealing their real identities from the U.S. government and their employers. IRCA presumed that immigrants were in the country illegally—this was, after all, the reason they were in need of amnesty—which left immigrants in the precarious position of having to reveal their “illegality” if they had any hopes of becoming “legal.”

As the May 4, 1988, deadline for IRCA applicants approached, the then named Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) launched an eleventh-hour publicity effort to attract last-minute applicants.30 In March 1988, and on days dubbed “Super Thursdays,” the INS offered “INS-approved counselors”


to answer questions and assist immigrants with the application process.31 Amid protests from residents in Corpus Christi, San Antonio, and Austin, as well as remote parts of Texas, that local legal centers had been shut down or the staff scaled back because of budget cuts, radio played a critical role in disseminat-ing up-to-date legal information. Two-minute, INS-produced public service announcements were added to local Spanish-language radio stations’ rotations to direct listeners to the nearest legal centers. While a local Spanish-language television station screened a weekly thirty-minute instruction video for po-tential applicants, local Spanish-language radio stations in Houston, El Paso, and Fort Worth took their microphones “on-location” to broadcast live from legal centers. The radio broadcasts frequently aired the center’s “hot line” to the Spanish-dominant listening public.32 Similar to seasonal public radio fund drives, when regular radio programming is reduced to accommodate station pleas for public support, Spanish-language radio rattled off hotline numbers, interviewed those entering and leaving the center, and disseminated informa-tion from within the walls of legal centers into listeners’ homes.33

On the other hand, the opportunity of amnesty for undocumented im-migrants elicited distressed responses as immigration raids in communities became widely publicized.34 Immigration raids, known informally in Spanish as las redadas, occur when immigration officials arrive unannounced at factories, fields, and other workplaces. Several newspaper headlines throughout the 1980s brought attention to immigration raids, in particular, to the influx of tips the INS received from disgruntled, unemployed U.S. citizens. An early industrial recession under Ronald Reagan’s presidency saw unemployment rates peak (at 10 percent) in 1982.35 Many (white) U.S. citizens may have correlated the recession with increasing (brown) population changes, making them feel that their livelihoods were being threatened. As the INS monitored workplaces and select public areas (or rather, as displeased citizens made public service calls to the agency), the passage of IRCA generated even more interest in Spanish-language Q&A shows on immigration and la migra alerts.

Since the 1980s, various radio stations have participated in alerting the lis-tening public to Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids or patrols.36 To place the significance in perspective, legally speaking, if an undocumented immigrant already residing in the United States decided to process her or his U.S. lawful permanent residency and had no criminal record, the process continues to be relatively straightforward (even if, as noted earlier, costly, lengthy, and involving paperwork plus appointments and perhaps requiring legal counsel). However, if a law enforcement officer or ICE official seized an


undocumented immigrant, the interaction can lead directly to removal proceed-ings. Depending on the situation and location, many are given the choice of immigrant detention or offered GPS ankle bracelets, a form of house and work arrest that tracks immigrants’ mileage.37 The ankle bracelet, as an alternative to detention, allows immigrants to live and possibly work in the United States until immigration officials hear their legal appeals. In essence the immigration process is guided by broad administrative discretion, providing both avenues for relief and removal. Being “caught” by ICE, in particular, hastens the de-portation process.38 Within this context, la migra alerts on the radio are much more significant for immigrants who have yet to start or are barred from the legal documentation process. These largely unprompted broadcasts reroute listeners away from public intersections and landmarks said to be susceptible to run-ins with ICE and other law enforcement officials. Part of this radio practice’s effective charm over the air lies in its elusive timing, not heard at set times but noticed only during moments of urgency.

During the mid-1980s, the community radio station KDNA-FM, located in the rural farm worker community of Yakima, Washington, witnessed a series of immigration raids. In response, KDNA-FM designated an individual to keep a periodic “INS watch” in the mornings. The “lookout” person would then call the station if she or he saw any “suspicious vans,” a popular mode of transportation that INS officials used at that time. So successful was its vigilant “INS watch” that the labor rights leader César Chávez visited the farmworker station. According to the station manager Ricardo García, Chávez advocated for reversing the cat-and-mouse chase and remarked, “Yeah, let’s follow la migra and broadcast where they are, I like that idea . . . instead of them always following us.”39 Caught between the powers of the INS and cognizant of a second-tiered (undocumented) legal status, la migra alerts allow listeners to live under the radar of surveillance by offering a form of inverse-surveillance. Specifically, these alerts make it possible for immigrants to “outwit” the state’s radar.

The climate of the 1980s influenced the station practices of many U.S. Spanish-language radio stations. The community radio’s “home-grown” ver-sion of immigration shows became substantially more polished on the U.S. Spanish-language commercial radio that began developing during the 1990s. The subversive use of radio during times of anti-immigrant public sentiment continued through Reagan’s term (and the equally damaging George H. W. Bush presidency); in fact, the 1990s proved actually much more tumultuous.


Sounds of Surveillance

The 1990s brought a series of grim legislative actions intended to intensify public scrutiny and border enforcement of immigrants. The INS expanded its surveillance plans by joining the Spanish-language airwaves through carefully devised and costly radio spots. In turn, Spanish-language radio stations turned to live and on-location broadcasts and amplified their vocal support for more just policies and treatment of immigrant-based issues.

In 1993, on discovering that the green card was the number-one counter-feited legal document, President Bill Clinton ordered all green card–carrying residents to exchange their card for a redesigned one that was more difficult to fake. Setting an eight-year time limit for the exchange, the INS began redocumenting thousands of legal residents. As the April 30, 2001, deadline approached, radio broadcasts began to ceremoniously call attention to the importance of redocumentation. For instance, a radio station in the San Diego area chose to broadcast across the street from San Diego’s INS district building. Listeners were encouraged to comply with the deadline and stop by their booth. Meanwhile, outside Los Angeles, another radio station broadcast outside a neighborhood legal services center and handed out station prizes to listeners who came to the center to inquire about the deadline.40 English-language radio stations typically reserve acts of on-site broadcasting for “grand openings,” festivals, and parades. Spanish-language radio’s decision to set up outside an INS building highlights not only the magnitude of these deadlines but also how listeners parley with the INS via radio broadcasts.

Known as the “Save Our State” (“SOS”) initiative, California’s Proposition 187 in 1994 targeted undocumented immigrants by denying them public services such as education and health care. Thanks to the “SOS” acronym, the popular perception of the immigrant sapping social services returned to the limelight, as California caricatured itself as a shipwrecked state.41 Proposition 187 also affected the larger public sentiment, most apparently in Latino-dom-inant cities such as Los Angeles, where the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations reported a “23.5 percent increase in hate crimes against Latinos in 1994, and attribute[d] the rise to anti-immigrant sentiment.”42

Anna Pegler-Gordon’s insightful study on immigration highlights the racial-ized bias during the heated Proposition 187 era in that those without “accents” or “foreign”-sounding names were not required to prove their legal status and were thereby automatically normalized as Americans. Inevitably, the grounds for suspicion relied on racial and linguistic profiling or the policing of those


with the “appearance of being an immigrant, revealed by body, name, accent, and national origin.”43 Perhaps most alarming, Proposition 187 sought to equip state employees, such as teachers and health officials, with the respon-sibility to “play” INS roles in demanding “suspicious” residents show proper verification of their legal status. Proposition 187’s lesser-known provisions sought to create “new state felonies for the manufacture, distribution, sale, or use of false citizenship and resident alien documents.”44 She rightly identifies the catch-22 situation presented to immigrants during Proposition 187 and found in subsequent debates over immigrants and their “place” in the United States: “Suspects are asked to produce identity papers: if they cannot produce papers, they are accused of being illegal; if they can produce papers, the papers are suspected of being fake.”45 Either way, immigrants risked being rebuffed whether or not they possessed proper legal documentation. The absolute linking of one’s American look or sound to proper legal documentation and then to public services relayed the message that only those who were legally documented were a part of the legitimate greater “public.”

Years later, and under similar anti-immigrant conditions, Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman makes a convincing argument in reference to Arizona’s SB 1070. This law would broaden powers to local and state law enforcement to identify those reasonably suspected of not carrying or possessing immigration docu-ments.46 For English-speaking Arizonians, the sounds of Spanish as well as one’s vocal “accent” can convey a sense of illegality, tapping into already racialized perceptions of Latino immigrants and Spanish as “noise.”47

Several accounts during the Proposition 187 era indicated that parents pulled their children out of schools, health clinics were empty, businesses bare, and several employers complained about immigrants being absent from work, thereby essentially suggesting that the Spanish-speaking public was confined in the home.48 According to the radio host Samuel Orozco, in such “climates of fear,” the phone lines were much busier during the Q&A immigration shows, indicating not only a more attentive listenership but also listeners’ reliance on asking questions from within the safety of their own homes.49 Questions posed over the air shifted from the formalities of legal paperwork to discerning whether teachers at specific schools or doctors in different clinics were able to question one’s legal status. “Can I walk my child to school?” asked a father of two. In a move that bolstered radio’s popularity with an already immigrant-based constituency, Spanish-language radio stations in the Los Angeles area aired free ads soliciting donations toward campaigns against Proposition 187.50

On the heels of a reelection victory, President Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) in 1997, a


piece of legislation responsible for funding the technological “tracking” systems used to more accurately monitor border crossers. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, IIRIRA incorporated the “use of aircraft, helicopters, night-vision equipment, [ground] sensors, computer systems, and four-wheel drive vehicles” to the U.S.-Mexico border,51 already reinforced with fences, newly constructed cement walls, hidden cameras, even e-mail and telephone taps, and other forms of data-veillance permitted in an effort to curb the human smuggling market. The enhanced methods of monitoring immigrants invoked military and Orwellian strategies. Several scholars, including Saskia Sassen and Douglas S. Massey, have pointed to the continued patterns of migration despite such border enforcement.52 IIRIRA allocated millions to construct a physical wall along select miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, further reflecting the “keep out” sentiment of the times.53

Together with Proposition 187’s efforts to sanction racial profiling, IIRIRA’s fresh revenues for border enforcement continued to rely on visual-based strate-gies of surveillance at a time when Spanish-language radio grew exponentially. In many respects, Q&A exchanges and la migra alerts decouple the sensory hierarchies where sight trumps sound. Despite their well-funded institutional muscle, ICE’s “high-tech” visual-tracking capabilities have been responded to through “low-tech” modes of sound.54

With the use and significance of radio already popular among Latino immigrants, the INS finally came to appreciate its power and importance among this demographic.55 In 1999, with immigrant deaths escalating in the warmer months, the INS produced a series of public service announcements that featured Jackie Gallegos, a twenty-five-year-old woman whose husband died of dehydration while crossing the border. Aired in select border cities, the thirty-second radio ad (in Spanish and English) used the widow’s mourning to warn listeners of the hazards of crossing the border.56 Previous radio warnings produced by the INS—as early as the 1940s—featured border patrol agents or immigration officials, male voices that gave stern warnings to listeners that border crossing is, indeed, an illegal act. The use of Gallegos’s voice, decades later, marked a compassionate turn in the INS’s rhetorical strategy, from sober warnings to evocative first-person accounts of the impact of these deaths on wives and children. The transition from a male to a female voice evoked a dif-ferent affect as scare tactics were redressed with gendered strategies of guilt. By eliminating border patrol agents and immigration officials from these radio ads, the message became less about the fear of being detained by the INS and more about the fear of death. The “new” designated opponent was the treach-erous dry climate of the desert, with no regard to immigration policy, shifts


in immigration law, or the demand for undocumented labor that continued to make these dangerous trails viable options. Policing duties were no longer assigned to ICE agents as women themselves were purportedly recruited to make sure loved ones did not risk perilous crossings. Clearly the INS, now ICE, was simply working toward the same goal of deterring northbound migration, though by different means. The emergent use of the airwaves by la migra themselves, through orchestrated public service announcements, has evolved in tandem with Latinos’ use of the radio to subvert state attempts to regulate them.

The Sounds of Post-9/11

The deaths along the desert continued in record numbers well into the next decade, prompting the INS to change its strategy by extending the geographic reach of its radio spots. In 2004 the INS bought broadcasting time in Mexico in an attempt to reach Mexican nationals located in rural regions south of Mexico City, from which a majority of Mexicans have migrated in recent years. During the treacherous summer months of 2004, the INS unveiled a $450,000 ad campaign titled “No Más Cruces en la Frontera” (No More Crosses on the Border). The word crosses has a double connotation of actual journey crossings as well as those crosses used as graveyard markers, gesturing toward the escalat-ing number of deaths that result from attempted border crossings. A departure from its previous low-budget warnings, the new campaign enlisted Mexican actors and more slick, high-tech graphics. According to the ad’s designer, the campaign was directed at two audiences—the “first-time user” considering crossing the border, and the “influencers,” or family members in the United States who cajoled relatives and friends to join them. The sound waves became contested ground: callers warned the listening public against the whereabouts of ICE; in turn, ICE cautioned the listeners from border crossings.

The aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, generated an alarm that the individuals responsible for the attacks were not U.S. citizens. The federal government swiftly revamped most of its immigration policy under the guise of national security or “the global war against terrorism.” In September 2004 legislation before Congress proposed adding an additional ten thousand border agents, four thousand more over the next five years, along the U.S.-Mexico border,57 assuming that terrorists will use the southern border as a point of entry. What is more, border patrol agents began implementing “sky raids” with newly acquired helicopters and


airplanes as part of an effort to increase aerial surveillance originally proposed in the 1990s.58

In addition to the financial resources allocated to Homeland Security for border surveillance, many civil liberties have also been compromised. Déjà vu moments occurred when offspring legislation such as the Patriot Act of 2001 and the Clean Law Enforcement for Alien Removal (CLEAR) Act of 2003 have attempted to make it possible for non-ICE personnel, such as local and state police, to exercise ICE duties by allowing them to investigate and detain undocumented immigrants discovered during normal law enforcement duties.59 Once again, bringing racial profiling to the fore of the immigration debate, such acts criminalize immigrants, assuming terrorist motives for migration, rather than economic incentives or family reunification.

The resurgence of immigration raids in the post-9/11 moment has also rekindled la migra alerts that had not been heard so vividly since the 1980s. KROM-FM in Texas, for instance, aired an intermittent morning limones verdes, or green lime report.60 The term green limes functioned as a code word for la migra. As the station’s program director explained, “Verdes, because they [INS or ICE officials] wear green uniforms, and limones, because if they catch you, they’ll sour your whole day.”61 The idea for the limones verdes radio report came from a listener who phoned in to the show and asked if he could convey an on-air good-bye to his friend who had been apprehended that morning. Although the caller’s good-bye began in a serious tone, he ended with, “well, I’ll see you next week.”62 The on-air good-bye signified not only the occur-rence and inconvenience of ICE apprehensions but also the reality that many Mexicans will attempt to cross the border again.

In June 2004, after a series of raids in the Los Angeles area, a cluster of Spanish-language radio stations also began broadcasting migra alerts. Using code words such as “la migraña,” or migraine, to report sightings, the stations also informed radio listeners of their rights. Broadcasts repeatedly told listeners not to sign anything, fearing it might be a voluntary deportation order, and warned that if apprehended by ICE, listeners had the right to remain silent.

Since 2006 an irregular segment resounds from Los Angeles’s radio station Que Buena. Morning listeners of the popular radio host Don Cheto recognize his catchy rendition of Vanilla Ice’s “ICE, ICE Baby.” Particular addresses, intersections, and/or landmarks, generated through listeners themselves, soon follow.63 From employing a vigilant watch to using music and constructing code words, radio, with its power to transcend distance, has been consistently used to “monitor” ICE and, to a lesser degree, as a form of inverse-surveillance.


From Washington to California, Arizona, and Texas, the topic of border agents’ locations has plainly affected the real lives of immigrants and U.S. Latinos. Without the comparable million-dollar budgets afforded the Department of Homeland Security—our tax dollars at work—la migra alerts exemplify how sound enables clear forms of political resistance by those most disenfranchised, armed simply with a telephone and a radio.

While conservatives such as Glenn Spencer—the president of the anti-immigrant citizen group based in Arizona called the “American Border Pa-trol”—protest such broadcastings, claiming that these radio stations are “aiding and abetting in the commission of a crime” by advising people on how to avoid detention, radio station managers claim that these “migra alerts” are simply relaying pertinent information to their listeners.64

With such heavy public emphasis on visual policing through racial profil-ing and documentation, Spanish-language radio, with its anonymous and veiled presence, serves a critical and mass role other media do not. Television and film do not have the same intimate capability as sound to broadcast live, impulsive notices with little to no trace of its existence. Broadcasting in Spanish has proved fortuitously subversive as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)—the official watchdog for radio broadcasting—employs a limited number of bilingual employees; this is an instance in which, argu-ably, institutional racism plays in the victim’s favor. Spanish, the very language deemed “domestic” and unworthy of learning by English-only advocates, has made transgressive sound practices possible. As of 2004 the FCC had just two bilingual staff investigators on its twenty-person payroll, which makes claims brought by Spencer and others most likely not a priority.65

Listening to Immigration

The nationally syndicated noon-hour talk show Linea Abierta (Open Line) hosts a weekly Q&A session with a guest attorney who rotates through as many as twenty callers per show. Each call is allocated approximately three to four minutes on the air, a difficult feat given that many find themselves surprised to have made it on the air, evident in the tremble in their voices or nervous stutter in their speech. In fact, because of the live nature of the show, listeners are also privy to an unedited soundscape. Papers shuffling, microphone taps, long sighs, awkward pauses, static reception, clearing throats, dishes clattering, and wavering voices are a few of the sonic, unstaged sounds that accompany the more structured Q&A exchange.


The show’s host, Samuel Orozco, kindly coaches nervous callers through their questions while the attorney limits interjections to clarifying questions before giving a final answer. Listeners can often hear the attorney discern dif-ficult questions with sighs, ums, and pregnant pauses. Out of twenty callers heard during a June 2004 Q&A broadcast soliciting advice from the guest at-torney Carlos Spector Calderón, only six asked questions about their own legal dilemmas. Over my two-year period of listening to Linea Abierta’s Q&A shows, it is painfully apparent that most women call on behalf of grown children, aging parents, and male partners left behind. Callers’ preparedness, shown in their clear crafting of questions, is also indicative of callers’ familiarity with the show’s format: guest attorneys typically ask a series of standard intake ques-tions before answering the caller’s “real” question. Prep questions include the person in question’s length of stay in the United States, age, nationality, mode of petitioning (through an employer or family member), and which specific paperwork they have turned in thus far.

Radio Bilingüe’s national coverage is limited to Spanish-language community radio stations located in rural areas and English-language community radio stations that use the show to reach out to bilingual Latino listeners. Relegated to rural Latino America, Radio Bilingüe is shut out of “Hispanic markets” such as Miami, Houston, and Los Angeles because of deregulation policies that have hindered the existence of lesser-financed radio stations. In 1995, with the acquisition of a satellite, thanks to a generous grant by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Radio Bilingüe expanded its borders via the Internet. Today it broadcasts its signature public affairs program Linea Abierta noon-hour show to over seventy station affiliates as well as to radio signals in both Mexico and Puerto Rico.

The following example, broadcast on April 27, 2004, is characteristic of the type of calls featured on the show. While the production office for Línea Abierta is located in San Francisco, the satellite responsible for transmitting the program to its station affiliates is located in Fresno, three hours south in California’s Central Valley. In the extended example below, the guest attorney is Calderón, participating from his law office in El Paso, Texas; the caller, Xiomara, phones in from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Orozco: Tenemos a Xiomara, quien llama de Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Xiomara, buenas tardes.

We go to Xiomara, who calls us from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Xiomara, good afternoon.


Xiomara: Primero, lo quiero felicitar por su programa. [Se oye como que va a llorar.] Nos ayuda mucho como inmigrantes.

I want to first congratulate you on your show. [Voice cracking.] It helps us a lot as immigrants.

Calderón: Gracias. Thank you. Orozco: Muchas gracias.

Many thanks. Xiomara: Mi pregunta es esta, mi mamá aplicó por la residencia para mi hermano.

My question is, my mother applied for my brother’s residency.

Orozco: [interrupción] ¿Puedo preguntar primero, Xiomara, cuál es tu nacionalidad?

[interrupting] Can I ask you first, Xiomara, what’s your nationality?

Xiomara: Soy salvadoreña.

I’m Salvadoran.

Orozco: Salvadoreña, OK.

Salvadoran, OK.

Xiomara: Bueno, mi mamá aplicó por mi hermano pero durante el proceso, mi her-mano se casó. [. . .] Bueno, recientemente, mi mamá aplicó por mi hermano en el 2000. Ahora que está casado, mi mama está aplicando por su familia. Me gustaría saber cuándo . . . mi mamá . . . mi mamá está esperando por alguna respuesta de la inmigración ¿Cuándo cree que esto será?

Well, my mother applied for my brother but during the processing of the

paperwork, my brother got married. [. . .] Well recently, my mother applied for my brother in 2000. He’s now married so my mother is applying for his family. I’d like to know when . . . my mother . . . my mother is waiting for some kind of response from the INS about my brother’s application. When do you think this would be, or?

Calderón: ¿Has recibido un recibo?


Have you received a receipt?

Xiomara: No, bueno, no sé. No le pregunté. Yo solo le dije que iba a llamar porque estaba escuchando la radio en este momento así que le pregunté por la información como fechas, el año de cuando aplicó.

No, well, I don’t know. I didn’t ask her. I just told her that I was going to call because I was listening to the radio at this moment so I asked her for the information of dates of when, the year, of when she applied.

Calderón: ¿Tu mamá es residente o ciudadana?

Is your mother a resident or a citizen?

Xiomara: Mi mamá es ciudadana, por eso aplicó por mi hermano en el 2000. [Se puede oir a niños.]

My mother is a citizen, that’s why she applied for my brother in 2000. [Children heard in the background.]

Calderón: Si el está casado, hijo de una Salvadoreña, ahorrita están [la inmigración] procesando esas aplicaciones con fecha del 15 de octubre, 1997. Si el fuera soltero, las aplicaciones de solteros que se están revisando tienen fecha del 22 de octubre, 2000.

If he’s married, son of a Salvadoran, right now they [INS] are processing those applications dated October 15, 1997. If he was single, the singles applications they are reviewing are dated October 22, 2000.

Xiomara: OK.

Calderón: Así que si no se hubiera casado es posible que ya lo hubieran procesado.

So, if he wouldn’t have gotten married he might have already been [legally] processed.

Xiomara: Sí. Yes.

Calderón: La ventaja es que cuando ya se ha procesado, su esposa también lo es.

The advantage is that once he’s [legally] processed, his wife is too.


Orozco: ¿Tenía prisa el amor, no?

Love was in a hurry, no?

Xiomara: Claro que sí. [Risitas]

Yes, of course. [Giggles]

Orozco: Los atrasó un poco.

It set them back a bit.

Xiomara: Bueno, lo que me está diciendo es que el 15 de octubre es cuando hijos de . . .

So, what you’re telling me is on October 15th is when the children of . . .

Calderón: [interrumpiendo] A esos los están entrevistando ahora. Los que entregaron su papeleo el 15 de octubre, 1997 o antes.

[interrupting] They are the ones being interviewed now. Those who turned in their paperwork on October 15, 1997, or before.

Xiomara: OK, 1997.

Calderón: Porque ustedes entregaron sus papeles en el 2000, tienen tres más años [de espera].

Since you guys turned in your paperwork in 2000, you have three more years [to wait].

The sound of Xiomara’s voice trembling at the beginning of this transcript serves as a powerful reminder that a disproportionate number of women call on behalf of male loved ones and are charged with making sense of immigra-tion timelines. Her voice finds its footing as she thanks the hosts on behalf of all immigrants and shares that she is calling at the behest of her mother about her brother’s dilemma. Xiomara calls to collect information and then is responsible for conveying the phone exchange with the rest of her family on both sides of the U.S. border.

Xiomara’s question deals with family reunification, by far the most com-monly heard topic within Q&A exchanges, despite its overt absence within discussions of immigration policy. The extended delay in processing Xiomara’s brother’s application is itself a result of familial matters, since he married dur-


ing the four years he waited for his application to be processed. Described by Xiomara as a “punishment,” her brother’s marriage took precedence over his migration to the United States. Orozco tries to make light of the tone by inject-ing the casual line that “love was in a hurry.” Xiomara giggles momentarily but immediately returns her attention to Calderón to make certain she has noted the exact window of her brother’s interview. In real-time and in three concise minutes, she lays out her brother’s ten-year wait with the show’s listeners. The INS is processing 1997 paperwork; her brother’s legal journey began in 2000 and his interview will take place in 2008, which means legal permission for him to enter the United States occurred in 2010.

These on-air discussions reveal the complicated and inherently emotional process of immigration, evident in Calderón’s slow and loud repetitions of his replies to Xiomara. Her low-hummed “uh-huh” and “sí,” peppered through-out the exchange, confirm her close listening. This excerpt also displays the “real-time” and interactive character of radio, as Xiomara admits that she was “listening to the radio at this moment” and decided to phone in. The fact that she called her mother beforehand to acquire specific dates speaks to Xiomara’s familiarity with the show’s format. Here, Xiomara—the audience—becomes the focus of the show, allowing her to be in conversation with two male pro-fessionals, evident in Orozco’s tone of authority and perfect enunciation and Calderón’s off-hand legal knowledge.

Apart from the actual Q&A exchange, the sound of children playing in the background—heard uniquely when women phone in—indicates that Xiomara is calling an immigration show from the privacy of her home and emphasizes again the responsibility that women take for their own families. Through radio, a larger transnational public listens to those sounds of Xiomara’s home, mak-ing evident that struggles over citizenship involve children and women. Each person is participating nationally from three geographically distinct areas—San Francisco (Orozco), Lancaster (Xiomara), and El Paso (Calderón )—made possible because of the urgency of immigration, the radio set itself, and the opportunity afforded through sound.

The overwhelming majority of callers ask guest attorneys about time lines.66 Many are anxious and want to know when ICE will contact them for subsequent interviews and question whether in-person visits to ICE offices would help speed their situation. Listeners can ascertain differing routes to legal documentation and track the pace of the ICE process through the air-waves. Listeners familiar with the show know that guest attorneys have access to information concerning the status and schedule of the ICE interviews. To listeners, guest attorneys may be seen as performing their own manner of


ICE and legal monitoring. Dependent on ICE for legal security, immigrants may view radio, and specifically such Q&A shows, as the vital link between themselves and key ICE-related information that they need.

In the face of visual-based surveillance and legislative tactics, Spanish-lan-guage broadcasting offers a transgressive possibility to patrol la migra in both its physical and its bureaucratic manifestations. The increased public scrutiny on immigration throughout the last thirty years has raised the political stakes of such radio broadcasts and has brought sound to the fore of immigrant-based media. The rampant growth coupled with the swelling popularity of Spanish-language radio indicates a greater desire to tune in through listening. Listeners learn to reimagine cultural or national allegiances while negotiating legal relationships with the state. Unlike other visual-based mediums, radio broadcasts can offer a live, somewhat unfiltered, and frequent means of audio communication between listeners themselves. Radio hosts, guest attorneys, and callers are indicative of larger shifts in immigration policy, linguistic changes on the radio dial, and the innovative uses of broadcasting.

Notes A faculty fellowship at Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies on Race and Ethnicity

as well as a research grant from UC Santa Barbara’s Chicano Studies Institute provided significant research support for this essay. My thanks to Rosa Linda Fregoso and Susan J. Douglas for their stead-fast encouragement to pursue radio; to Nicholas L. Syrett for his generous and sharp eleventh-hour readings; to Robin Li, Felicity Schaeffer-Grabiel, Deborah Paredez, and Deborah Vargas for their exceptional comments throughout the gestation of this essay; and last but never the least, to Magda and Alejandro Olivares for their labor as my child-care providers.

1. I have chosen not to signal to the reader by way of italics when Spanish is written, since, in my opinion, it tends to support U.S.-based class, racial, and linguistic hierarchies, particularly in regard to Spanish. For insightful discussions of language politics, I recommend Gloria Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” in Borderlands: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1997), 207–43; Frances R. Aparicio, “Whose Spanish? Whose Language? Whose Power? Testifying to Dif-ferential Bilingualism,” Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures 12 (1998): 5–25; Bonnie Urciuoli, Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998); and Jane Hill, “Covert Racist Discourse: Metaphors, Mocking, and the Racialization of Historically Spanish-Speaking Populations in the United States,” in The Everyday Language of White Racism (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 119–57.

2. Several musical genres from corridos to banda lyrically narrate the border crossing and political struggles of Mexican people. See Américo Paredes, “With a Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and His Hero (1958; Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004); and Helena Simonett, Banda: Mexican Musical Life across Borders (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2001).

3. Félix F. Gutiérrez and Jorge Reina Schement, Spanish Language Radio in the Southwestern United States (Austin: Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas, 1979).

4. Personal interview with María Fincher, KBBF-FM, March 22, 2004. 5. The ethnic labels “U.S. Latino” and “Latino” refer to persons of any Latin American origin living

within the geographic boundaries of the United States. Given that this essay focuses on radio practices


in regard to immigration, citizenship, and ICE together with geographic attention to Texas and the Pacific Northwest, these labels point to Mexican and Central American specific populations.

6. Rosaura Sánchez, “Mapping the Spanish Language along a Multi-ethnic and Multi-lingual Border,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 21.1–2 (1992–96): 49–104; and Hill, “Covert Racist Discourse.” Equally significant, this form of racialization takes place with Puerto Ricans as well. See Uricuoli, “Exposing Prejudice.”

7. Steven W. Bender, “Sight, Sound, and Stereotype: The War on Terrorism and Its Consequences for Latinas/os,” Oregon Law Review 81 (2002): 1153–78; Kevin Johnson, “September 11 and Mexican Immigrants: Collateral Damage Comes Home,” DePaul Law Review 52 (2003): 849–70; and David Manuel Hernández, “Pursuant to Deportation: Latinos and Immigrant Detention,” Latino Studies 6 (2008): 35–63.

8. Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York: Routledge, 1997), especially chap. 6.

9. For a rare exception, see Ari Y. Kelman, Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

10. See, for instance the provocative arguments of Otto Santa Anna, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of La-tinos in Contemporary American Discourse (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); and Leo Chavez, Covering Immigration: Popular Images and the Politics of the Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

11. Unfortunately, there have been numerous intense moments of public anti-immigrant rhetoric and racism throughout the last thirty years. In the interest of brevity, however, this essay focuses on three events that can be substantiated with evidence.

12. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; New York: Verso Books, 1991), 145.

13. William V. Flores, “Citizens vs. Citizenry: Undocumented Immigrants and Latino Cultural Citizen-ship,” in Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights, ed. William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor, 255–78 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).

14. Dolores Inés Casillas, “Puuurrrooo MÉXICO! Listening to Transnationalism on U.S. Spanish-Language Radio,” in Beyond el Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America, ed. Gina Perez, Frank Guridy, and Adrian Burgos (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 44–62.

15. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

16. Dolores Inés Casillas, “Adiós El Cucuy: Immigration and Laughter on Spanish-Language Radio,” Boom: A Journal of California, (September 2011): 11–24.

17. Rosemary Scott with Reed Bunzel, “Muy Caliente,” Radio Ink, May 27, 2002.18. Ibid.19. Arbitron, “Hispanic Radio Today: How America Listens to Radio” (2009), http://www.arbitron.com/

radio_stations/reference_hispanic.htm (accessed July 15, 2010). 20. Arbitron/Edison Media Research, “Internet and Multimedia Research 2005: The On-Demand Media

Consumer” (2005), http://www.arbitron.com/downloads/IM2005Study.pdf (accessed July 15, 2010).21. Arbitron, “Hispanic Radio Today: How America Listens to Radio” (2004), http://www.arbitron.com/

downloads/hispanicradiotoday04.pdf (accessed July 15, 2010); and “The Power of Hispanic Consum-ers (2004–05),” http://www.arbitron.com/downloads/hisp_consumer_study_2004.pdf (accessed July 15, 2010).

22. Arbitron, “Hispanic Radio Today: How America Listens to Radio.”23. For an example of mainstream coverage of Spanish-language radio’s growth and success, see Susan

Warren, “Stations Change Tune to Woo Hispanics,” Wall Street Journal, January 25, 1995; Donna Petrozello, “Audience Share Swells for Spanish Formats,” Broadcasting and Cable, January 22, 1996, 122; Kathy Haley, “Radio Rides Hispanic Population Boom,” Broadcasting and Cable, October 6, 1997, 45; and Alonso Alfredo, “Spanish Niche Formats: A Radio Gold Mine,” Billboard, April 29, 2006, 4.

24. Mari Castañeda Paredes, “The Transformation of Spanish-Language Radio in the United States,” Journal of Radio Studies 10.1 (June 2003): 5–15.

25. Lisa Catazanarite, “Wage Penalties in Brown-Collar Occupations,” in Latino Policy and Issues Brief, no. 8 (Los Angeles: Chicano Research Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 2003), 1–4.


26. Pew Hispanic Center, “Table 34. Median Personal Earnings for Full-Time, Year-Round Workers, by Race and Ethnicity, 2009,” http://pewhispanic.org/files/factsheets/hispanics2009/Table%2034.pdf (accessed on May 25, 2011).

27. Officially, the Bracero Program ended in 1947 but continued in tandem with other federal agencies in various forms until 1964. See Kitty Calavita, Inside the State, the Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. (New York: Routledge, 1992).

28. Ibid.29. Matt Moffett and Diana Solis, “Alien Process,” Wall Street Journal, November 26, 1986. 30. This essay uses the then designation of the Immigration and Naturalization Services when discussing

immigration and border enforcement to refer to this agency before their rechristening as Immigra-tion Customs and Enforcement in 2002. The aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, reassigned the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) to the newly formed “Department of Homeland Security” and rechristened the department as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After more than seventy years as the INS, the office went through a makeover, complete with a new name: the Office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Still referred to widely on Spanish-language radio as the INS or la migra, the makeover has not proved entirely convincing.

31. Susan Warren, “INS Intensifying Publicity Efforts in Push before Amnesty Deadline,” Houston Chronicle, March 3, 1988.

32. Ibid.33. Annette Kondo, “Radio Station Spreads the Word on Green Cards,” Los Angeles Times, April 5, 2001,

B8; and Karin Brulliard, “Spanish Radio Tunes into Immigration Quandaries,” Washington Post, April 3, 2006, B1.

34. A few newspaper selections include “Labor Leaders Call Immigration Roundup ‘Union Busting’ Scheme,” Houston Chronicle, January 25, 1986; “Aliens Arrested at Fort Worth Camp,” Dallas Morning News, September 30, 1986; “LAX Raid Praised, INS Praised,” Los Angeles Times, October 1, 1986; and “Hard Times Intensify Debate,” Houston Chronicle, November 16, 1986.

35. For primary coverage see “Unemployment, Hard Times in America,” Boston Globe, November 7, 1981; “Reagan Abandons Pledge to Balance Budget by 1984,” Washington Post, November 7, 1981; “Joblessness Expected to Climb,” Washington Post, November 16, 1981; and “Jobless Rate Hits 9.5 percent,” Boston Globe, June 4, 1982; and “The Depression in Rural America,” Washington Post, July 10, 1982.

36. “National News Brief: Radio Alerts Immigrants to Roving Border Patrols,” New York Times, October 16, 2000, A20.

37. David Manuel Hernández, “Pursuant to Deportation.” Ankle bracelets, initially said to be introduced in 2004 in select areas, are now commonplace in thirty cities. See the blog riff of Sarah Phelan, “Who Profits from ICE’s electronic monitoring?,” San Francisco Chronicle Political Blog , March 16, 2010, http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2010/03/16/who-profits-ices-electronic-monitoring-anklets-0 (accessed May 25, 2011).

38. Moreover, in the last decade the increasing collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement has necessitated what David Manuel Hernández refers to as a “no contact zone” between immigrants and ICE, law enforcement, and other government entities. See Hernández, “‘My Fellow Citizens . . .’: Barack Obama and Immigration Policy,” Journal of Race and Policy 6.1 (Spring–Summer 2010): 24–44.

39. Telephone interview with Ricardo García, KDNA-FM, February 22, 2005.40. Elena Shore, “Immigration Raids in California Test Spanish Language Media,” Pacific News Service,

June 17, 2004, http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=96ec947efd059e05acd9c716f64e3f0e (accessed May 25, 2011).

41. For a concise and critical analysis of the Proposition 187 campaign, see Kent Ono and John Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).

42. Anna Pegler-Gordon, “In Sight of America: Photography and U.S. Immigration Policy” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2002), 346.

43. Ibid., 345.44. Ibid., 342.


45. Ibid., 348.46. Randal Archibold, “Arizona’s Effect to Bolster Local Immigration Authority Divides Law Enforcement,”

New York Times, April 21, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/us/22immig.html (accessed May 26, 2011).

47. Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, “The Noise of SB 1070 or Do I Sound Illegal to You?” Sounding Out Blog, http://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/08/19/the-noise-of-sb-1070/ (accessed December 5, 2010).

48. For two newspaper examples, see “Judge Bars Enforcement of Anti-Immigration Measure,” Washington Post, December 15, 1994, A4; and Laura Mecoy, “Confusion Swirls around Prop 187,” Sacramento Bee, December 14, 1994, A1, A24.

49. Personal interview with Samuel Orozco, Radio Bilingüe, August 20, 2004.50. Patrick J McDonnell, “Proposition 187: Spanish-Language Media Fight Initiative,” Los Angeles Times,

October 7, 1994, http://articles.latimes.com/1994-10-07/local/me-47714_1_la-opinion-univision-television-group-spanish-language-television-and-radio (accessed December 5, 2010).

51. Belinda I. Reyes, Hans P. Johnson, Richard Van Swearingen, “Holding the Line? The Effect of Recent Border Build-up on Unauthorized Immigration” (San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, July 2002), 2.

52. Saskia Sassen, Guests and Aliens (New York: New Press, 1999); and Douglas S. Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan Malone, Smoke and Mirrors: U.S. Immigration Policy in the Age of Globalization (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001).

53. The decade of the 1990s ushered a sweep of Operations: “Operation Hold the Line” in El Paso, Texas (1993); “Operation Gatekeeper” in San Diego and El Centro, California (1994); “Operation Safeguard” in select areas in Arizona (1994); and “Operation Rio Grande” in the Texas valleys of McAllen and Laredo (1997). See Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Border (New York: Routledge, 2002).

54. Josh Kun, “Playing the Fence, Listening to the Line: Sound, Sound Art, and Acoustic Politics at the US-Mexico Border,” in Performance in the Borderlands: A Critical Anthology, ed. Harvey Young and Ramon Rivera-Servera (Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 17–35.

55. The INS has its own tradition of employing radio to communicate with its constituents, namely, Mexicans and Central Americans. In 1997 the INS petitioned the Federal Communications Com-mission (FCC) for a license to broadcast an AM signal from a border station located in El Paso. In an effort to produce its own “alerts,” a Houston Chronicle column dated September 3, 1997, reported that then INS spokesman Dan Kane believed the signal would “improve the quality of customer service” and aid the agency in being “more effective in [its] law enforcement capabilities.” In an attempt to move away from their previous military character, securing a radio station was described as a public-relations effort. Despite the enthusiastically drafted news release by the INS, I could find no evidence to indicate whether the FCC actually secured the radio signal or whether it was already in operation covertly.

56. “Widow Warns about Dangers of Border-Crossing,” Dallas Morning News, June 26, 1999, A35.57. Edward Epstein, “Intelligence Overhaul Bill Called Bad for Immigrants,” San Francisco Chronicle,

September 30, 2004, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/09/30/MNGOU9185I1.DTL (accessed May 25, 2011).

58. Jonathan Xavier Inda, Targeting Immigrants: Government, Technology, and Ethics (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).

59. Anny Bakalian and Medhi Bozorgmehr, Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

60. “Coded Radio Broadcasts Used to Tip Off Illegal Immigrants,” Houston Chronicle, October 16, 2000, A17.

61. Scott Baldauf, “It’s Not Easy Being Green,” Christian Science Monitor, November 3, 2000.62. Ibid.63. Josh Kun, “Immigrant Sage: How a 70-Year-Old Curmudgeon, Played by a 28-Year-Old, Became

One of the Most Popular Personalities on L.A. Radio,” Los Angeles Magazine, December 2008.64. Ibid.65. Chris Baker, “FCC Overlooks Spanish Radio Stations in Crackdown,” Washington Times, May 4,

2004, A1. 66. Personal interviews with Samuel Orozco, August 22, 2004, and March 20, 2005.

Sounds of Surveillance: U.S. Spanish- Language Radio Patrols La Migra

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